What happens when the mind tries to step outside itself and understand what it is?
In this conversation, I’m joined by writer, philosopher, and photographer Steven Seidenberg, author of Coda, a strange, funny, philosophically dense work that resists the very thing the mind continually reaches for: solid ground.
We explore the instability of the self, the unreliability and necessity of memory, and the difficulty of separating experience from the interpretations we place upon it. Steven argues that confusion and contradiction are not always obstacles to understanding. In fact, sometimes they are precisely where deeper inquiry begins.
Our conversation moves through Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Buddhist and contemplative traditions, and the question of whether philosophy might sometimes be better understood as a form of art rather than a transparent statement of what its author believes.
We also discuss the dangers of taking uncertainty too far. Recognizing the limits of our knowledge does not mean that every claim is equally doubtful, or that truth disappears. Steven reflects on evidence, moral truth, capitalism, exploitation, and the ways our culture encourages us to understand ourselves through productivity and economic value.
Toward the end, we turn to silence, mortality, and Steven’s photography. His images often preserve the traces of human beings while leaving the people themselves outside the frame—a practice that raises fascinating questions about objectification, absence, empathy, and what it means to represent another person without reducing them to an object.
This is a conversation about consciousness and groundlessness, but also about how to live within them: how to think clearly without demanding certainty, how to remain open to ambiguity without collapsing into relativism, and how art can help us see what our usual ways of thinking leave out.
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